LET'S get the labels out of the way first. Right wing? Right of centre? "This is typical Irish intellectual poverty which involves looking to the English model to make comparisons," he says. "If you look to European politics the Progressive Democrats are instantly recognisable as a European liberal party." They are not conservative and reactionary, but enlightened and radical, he says.
The radical policies he suggests include having the long term unemployed perform socially useful work rather than paid for doing nothing; a more punitive prison regime; privatisation of £2 billion worth of State assets and, of course, cuts in personal taxation.
"We are policy driven and that is a bit unusual in Irish politics. We are radical rather than incrementalists. Our policies by any international standards would not be seen as rightwing by any traditional use of that term." He hopes to bring this radical enlightened liberalism into an Irish government very shortly. "The way things are shaping up the present Government is obviously intending to fight the next election as a unit, and that unit excludes us."
Labour is attempting to portray his party - and him personally - as fearful things from which the electorate can only be saved by voting Labour. He makes the point in reverse: Labour and its present leadership can only be put out of government by voting PD, he says.
"The choice for the Irish people in the next election is between the Progressive Democrats and Labour and that choice is a very straightforward one. The Labour Party under its current leadership and its current policies is definitely not compatible with the Progressive Democrats." Nor is Democratic Left, he adds.
He sees no compatibility problems with Fianna Fail, despite the bitter experience of the first time they combined. "That government was regarded by many of its participants as a temporary interruption and a temporary little arrangement. The ground in Irish politics has shifted dramatically since. Now it is clear that the days of single party government are over." Fianna Fail will accept coalition now.
Do you want to be a minister or attorney general? The usual rumour is that you want to be attorney general? "It's now getting so near the possibility that I'd better be circumspect about what I say, and I suppose the answer is that I want to do whatever I can to help the Progressive Democrats perform effectively in government."
Is ideology alive in Irish politics? You say the ideological (choice in the next election is between Labour and the PDs as the junior partners in government, but can you point to a radical gap between what a Fianna Fail-PD government would do and what this present Government would do? "Yes. Take education. I believe that a government not involving Labour would not attempt to impose on the country 10 regional education boards costing between £50 million and £100 million, and would not attempt to decisively alter the balance between private and State initiative in education and wouldn't use so called parental involvement as a smokescreen for extending the power of the State massively in education.
"Things like the third banking force wouldn't be on the agenda. Another government would have a non ideological approach to the ownership of State and semi state assets and an entirely pragmatic case by case review of that role of the State. Decisions would be made in the interests of workers and the consumer which I think would be different from the ones that are made now.
CUTTING personal taxation has been a core value of the Progressive Democrats since their foundation, and he claims they have an unrivalled record. "The record of the PDs and FF in government from 1989 to 1992 speaks for itself. In 1989 there were three rates of tax - 35, 48 and 58 per cent - and in 1992 there were two rates of tax - 27 and 48 - and if that government lasted one more budget we would have got to 25 and 44 per cent." He supports cuts in the upper tax rate as well as the lower one, rejecting the suggestion that this gives benefit to the well off rather than concentrating it on the lower paid.
"The upper rate of 48 per cent is now being paid by single people earning well below the average industrial wage. When you add on PRSI it means that the State takes more than half of every extra pound they earn below the average industrial wage. That's a very strange situation from the point of view of a country that has had a so called eft wing party in office for 15 out of the last 25 years.
The Labour Party brought down governments over the identity of judges, but they've never taken a stance on the taxation of low paid workers. When they got into office in 1972 two per cent of taxpayers paid above the standard rate of income tax. When they left office in 1987, 43 per cent of tax payers paid it. That's the legacy of Labour.
The PDs have said there is billion to be made through the privatisation of State assets, but while an enthusiast for such sales, he rejects comparisons with the Thatcher agenda. "We don't have an ideological approach to privatisation and every single case is different to the next.
"For example, it is not practical in Irish terms to privatise the ESB, but there is no reason why private capital should not go into electricity generation.
"Bord Gais is a monopoly supplier of gas, and there is no point in having a private monopoly rather than a public monopoly just on the basis of ideology." So Bord Gais won't be on the market, but others, if the PDs have their way, will be.
"ALAN Dukes has finally faced up to the fact that Aer Lingus needs a strategic partner. In that context we have to ask ourselves, just as in Telecom, what the function of the State's shareholding will continue to be. Can the same function be achieved by a golden share with specific voting rights on specific strategic issues? "Aer Rianta is another case in point. Why is it that the taxpayers should fund expansion at Dublin Airport? Why can't that be done by private capital? Why is it that Aer Rianta is buying regional airports that have been privatised in England and yet remains a State monopoly in effect here? I would much prefer to have Irish pension funds free to invest in Aer Rianta rather than have the national debt invested in Aer Rianta."
And what about national transport, CIE, Iarnrod Eireann...
"CIE needs a rethink of a massive kind. Under EU competition directives Ireland is not going to be able to run road transport and rail transport on a State monopoly basis from now on and we have to prepare for that.
"For instance there must be an increased emphasis on public transport in Dublin. I wonder does it make sense to breathe life into the present dinosaur or to have public transport companies in which the workers would have a direct commercial interest, maybe through co ops or things like that.
"If public transport in Dublin is going to become more and more important the question you have to ask is is it going to be a State monopoly or not. The overwhelming case is against it.
On a very conservative estimate there is £2 billion worth of State assets to be privatised. Just going through the semi state banks - which something has to be done about - TSB is £175 million waiting to be collected, and due to ideological paralysis the Government is just refusing to make any decision about TSB. I note that out strategic partner in Telecom, KPN Telia, want us to consider making the remaining majority shareholding available for private investment and that's an initiative we should contemplate doing."
PRIVATISATION is not an end in itself, he says. It's only a means to freeing up the economy and freeing the State from debt. The receipts from sales of State assets would help to reduce national debt and therefore free the State from debt servicing costs.
Citing the inefficiency of many privatised British industries and scandals about the salary levels of their top executives brings another accusation of Anglocentric myopia. "This is typical of Irish insularity, that we look at all the English mistakes and we don't look at what is happening in, say, Germany.
"They decided to privatise their Telecom system, they are not keeping a majority stake for the State. Socialist parties in France and Spain have privatised. You certainly don't go for the quick fix sell off. I think a lot of mistakes made by the Thatcherites in England were to do with rushing through things, with a manic zeal to get them off the State's ledger without thinking of the exact consequences."
The public service, he says, needs a radical shake up that is not provided for in the Government legislation published two weeks ago. "Performance related pay isn't sufficient, you have to have what they have in New Zealand - a state services commission which gives a contract to the management of the Department of Social Welfare, gives them performance targets to meet within a specific time and the top management get remunerated on the basis of their success.
"I think the Strategic Management Initiative and the recent legislative proposals are a halfhearted attempt to make some gestures towards that kind of thing." He cites the Blood Transfusion Service Board as a body that has displayed public service malaise. "If it was a private company a lot of people would have lost their jobs a long time ago. There wouldn't have been golden handshakes. Now I'm not suggesting that the BTSB should be a private company, but I'm just suggesting that we need a different culture with regard to error and responsibility and accountability."
Public service staffing levels should be cut, he says. "With increasing productivity and slimming down the role of the State in society it should be possible to have the State's functions discharged by a smaller number of people.
"We are suggesting a nonreplacement policy in order to oblige the public service to get the best possible value out of its staff. In other words, tell the public service to ensure that 98 people can do this year what loo did last year. They have all the technology and computers and outside consultants, so they should make savings. That's what happens in every other state other than China."
He and his party have been making more pragmatic noises about Ireland joining the European single currency than any of the other main parties, whose public utterances are filled with enthusiasm.
"My own view is that we will probably have to go in on the first wave. But I think a lot depends on the extent to which currencies like sterling can engage in competitive devaluation after the start of EMU. We will have to make a hard nosed pragmatic decision as to where Ireland's interest lies." His party criticises social exclusion, but also "the dependency culture".
What does he say to those who hear the PDs talk about this and interpret it as a criticism of those who are dependent rather than the culture which makes them dependent? "I have a visceral dislike of the policies of human set aside which the country is running at the moment. We have put in place a tax system which takes more than half of the earnings of the low to average paid industrial workers. We have a welfare system which when combined with that system means that the difference between working and not working is for many people negligible."
We know what you want to do to the taxation system to try to deal with that. What would you do to the social welfare system?
"Unemployment benefit has to be developed in a way that fosters economic participation. I believe that it is criminal to give anybody under the age of 25 money for doing nothing. Training should be the only response of the State to unemployment for younger people. "Likewise I believe for those that are in long term unemployment, or whatever reason - and I don't agree with the ISME term social misfits - but for those who have fallen through the net to the extent that they are out of work for three years or more, for who statistically the prospects of getting a job in a computer firm are zero, the reality is that you - have to devise some form of third sector employment of a part time kind so that for two or three days a week they help out on something that is socially useful.
"The present system of human set side involves telling people, `Just do nothing. Don't dare do anything, take your money and if you earn a halfpenny for yourself we'll be down to see you.' That's outrageous." The long term unemployed doing this socially useful work would not need to be paid much more than they receive on the dole, he says. The alternative view - that instead of making the long term unemployed do low paid third sector work, money should be spent on major retraining programmes - will only work for some.
"I think you are codding yourself if you think you are going to get somebody who is unskilled, in his 40s, and at the moment has a life centred on the unemployment centre, the pub, the fags and the telly - by pouring money into a training programme you're not going to turn that person around so that in his 50s he is suddenly going to get a top flight job.
"That's not what is going to happen. For some people you can, and you have to have a method for the people who have the potential to get out of the rut they are in.
"But the reality is that for many many people you have to say, can you find some socially useful work for them to do, whether it is training a young team in football, groundsman at a local football club, part time assistance in a school - teaching assistance, answering the phone or whatever else there is - there are things in Irish society that can be done. What I am radically opposed to is the idea that the response to people in that category is to say, do absolutely nothing, don't dare do anything and we will give you money." Personal experience, he says, tells him that crime rates are not being exaggerated or hyped.
"One of the most extraordinary phenomena of my last year in politics has been people coming to my clinic just to tell me about what has happened to them - extraordinary stories of terrible savagery. There is fear in people's minds and Ireland as a society has failed to confront the crime issue.
"We have tried out in a very half hearted and ill considered way social democratic theory in the last 10 or 15, years and it has come a cropper.
What social democratic theory? "For example, Ken Whitaker said in 1985 that in to years' time we need 4,000 places in our prisons if we don't get on top of the crime issue. That turned out to be a conservative estimate. We need 4,500 I'd say and we don't have them.
"He proposed a number of changes in the penal system, most of which were well intentioned but very few of which were implemented. Community service was proposed but it turned out to be so expensive to employ supervisory staff that that's an extremely limited option.
"One of the phrases used in that report that is indicative of the nature of the problem is you should go to prison as a punishment, not to be punished." He disagrees fundamentally.
The approach in that report "means the only punishment involved in imprisonment should be deprivation of your liberty, and once that is accepted you should be allowed be in your own clothes, watch TV, improve yourself". But it's generally accepted that prison is not a holiday camp? "A very senior official in the Irish prosecution scene told me recently that 30 years ago when somebody was sent to jail for about three years there would be a sigh in the courtroom. The reason was that jail was not a nice place to be. You had a very rigorous regime, prison uniform, prison work and that was it and you came out of the place knowing you hadn't been in an internment camp, you had been in prison.
"Now there is an appetite for longer and longer sentences, when the length of the sentences is achieving nothing. Now it's commonplace for people to get two and three years in prison and to be out in a week or a month."
He agrees with the Fianna Fail proposal for a "zero tolerance" approach to crime. "Zero tolerance means that you don't simply have law with no order, you enforce your laws. If a child is begging on O'Connell Street he is brought down to a police station, his parents are contacted and brought down there and he is prevented from begging having children begging is child abuse and it's organised or certainly connived at by the parents.
"ZERO tolerance must start at the top. It goes right up to the top of the beef industry, massive tax evasion, who has been held to account for that? Nobody. You have to have an atmosphere of compliance with the law. If you go down to Temple Bar any summer evening and see all the people spilling round drinking on the streets, that's all illegal.
"Now, either it is illegal or it is not illegal, either we allow people get maggoty and fall around the street in Temple Bar and have parties swilling beer or we don't. But you can't have a situation where it is theoretically illegal but nothing happens about it." He says he fully accepts the link between social deprivation and crime. Social exclusion and crime are one and the same issue, he says. "The response of entire communities and entire cohorts of youths in those communities to the realisation that they are not part of the economic life or game plan of the country is going to be crime."
He says there is now substantial agreement between the main parties on Northern Ireland. Asked about the Fianna Fail suggestion that Albert Reynolds would have a big role in Northern Ireland policy during the next government, he says that is a matter for Fianna Fail.
But "it's for whoever is in the government to run the Northern Ireland policy of this State intermediaries are always welcome but it is for the government to govern."
MICHAEL McDowell is abrasive, ambitious, highly intelligent, arrogant - and good company. The Progressive Democrats' finance spokesman doesn't take prisoners, either in the courts, where he has honed his adversarial legal skills, or in the Dail, where he cleaves to the imperative of being radical or redundant.
Mr McDowell has been the intellectual dynamo behind much of the Progressive Democrats' success, working tirelessly on policies, speeches and newspaper articles; devising parliamentary tactics and providing a critical Constitution based analysis of government legislation. Without his keen intellect and driven ideological commitment, the party might have lapsed into populism.
His enemies detect a whiff of Blueshirt extremism in his make up. And his views on private education, on economic and social matters, are projected as a form of dangerous elitism.
Never afraid to speak his mind, he cut his political teeth on the ankles of Garret FitzGerald. As chairman of Fine Gael Dublin South East constituency during the 1982-87 coalition government, he berated the then Taoiseach at meetings for failing to curb Labour's ideological and spending inclinations.
When Des O'Malley was forced out of Fianna Fail in 1986 and formed the Progressive Democrats on a radical programme of reducing the national debt and cutting taxes, Michael McDowell was one of the first Fine Gaelers to join the mouldbreaking party. The grandson of Eoin MacNeill became party chairman and was elected to the Dail on his first attempt in 1987.
The Progressive Democrats party was on a roll, selling a uniquely reformist economic policy and winning 14 seats. Two years later, the party's distinctive identity had been buried by the policies of fiscal rectitude adopted by the minority Fianna Fail Government, propped up by Fine Gael's Tallaght Strategy. When an election was held, Mr McDowell and seven of his parliamentary colleagues lost out.